Allegedly Democratic senators Kent Conrad (ND), Ben Nelson (NE), and Evan Bayh (IN) apparently will vote to extend all the Bush tax cuts, including those of the mega-wealthy, for two more years, which probably means they will be extended two more years. I take these three are afraid of being accused of “raising taxes” before a midterm, so they’ll throw responsibility under the bus.

Sometimes I think there are two John Funds David Frums.

Update: Sorry; I should never post after 10 pm. I don’t know where by brain is then.

Media Matters has a video of Shirley Sherrod’s full speech, with a transcript of the essential parts, and it is now beyond a doubt that Andrew Breitbart shamelessly slandered this good woman, and I hope she sues him for everything he’s worth.

Breitbart’s excuse, that he didn’t see the full video before he publicized the edited version, ought to give Breitbart no legal shelter. Seems to me that for a professional media figure to publish something damaging to an individual without properly vetting it first falls under the purview of “reckless disregard for the truth.”

I really hope the Obama Administration gives her her job back. If they don’t, this will not only perpetrate the injustice but would be a huge wasted opportunity.

What else do we know?

Will this episode hurt Andrew Breitbart’s reputation among his rightie admirers? Of course not.
Will Fox News use more caution about using videos from Breitbart in the future? Nope.
Will some elements on the Right dig up whatever they can find to further slander Shirley Sherrod? Certainly.

Update: Breitbart is now claiming the farmer and his wife who spoke up on Sherrod’s behalf are “plants.”

Update: Salon: “Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized to Shirley Sherrod for her unnecessary firing. He also offered her an unspecified new job with the USDA. According to CNN, Sherrod will think the job offer over for a few days before making a decision.”

I’ve been busy with other things but want to at least link to the blowup over Andrew Breitbart’s latest attempt at video propaganda. Breitbart put into circulation a video snipped from a speech by a black USDA employee who seemed to be saying she withheld help from a white farmer because of his attitude. The wingnuts jumped on this as proof that the Obama Administration discriminates against whites. The employee, Shirley Sherrod, promptly lost her job, and even the NAACP condemned her.

But then, the wife of the farmer who allegedly had been discriminated against by Sherrod came out in defense of Sherrod. “Eloise Spooner said as far as she’s concerned Sherrod worked tirelessly to help the couple hold onto their land as they faced bankruptcy,” says the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Apparently, Sherrod’s talk was about how working with this white family helped her overcome her own issues about race. The NAACP now says they were “snookered” by Breitbart.

However, last I heard Sherrod was still out of a job.

The Washington Post is running a Big Deal investigative piece on our secretive national security infrastructure. This investigation has been going on for two years. It covers “The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

I have not read the entire thing yet, but the gist of it is that this national security infrastructure is big and secretive, and pretty much ineffectual. It’s ineffectual because it is so big and clumsily organized, and so secret it’s a mystery even to itself. It gathers far more data than anyone can analyze and cranks out far more reports than anyone has time to read. It’s so big it’s a challenge even for the Guys In Charge to know what all the parts of the infrastructure are, never mind what they’re finding. Apparently there is no coordinating agency and no way for anyone to know what all the parts are up to at any given moment or how much of what the parts are doing is duplicating what the other parts are doing.

Now, this much isn’t really news. I know I have blogged about such complaints before, although I’m not finding the posts. Very basically, after September 11 the Bush Administration went into overdrive creating new intelligence nets without bothering to come up with a coordinated, systemic way of sorting and analyzing the intelligence. And here’s no way to know if and how much the parts are skirting the law and the Constitution regarding the rights of citizens.

If we were living in a futuristic political novel, this would be Chapter One of how Big Brother Came to Power. As Glenn Greenwald says, “we keep sacrificing our privacy to the always-growing National Security State in exchange for less security.” What’s growing is a surveillance network that is scarier than al Qaeda. This is how dictatorships begin.

Naturally, the usual suspects who scream perpetually about Big Government have a different view.

TownHall: ObamaCare is worse.

Fox News: Obama should be ashamed.

Weekly Standard: La la la nothing to see here move along hey isn’t that Lindsey Lohan?

Daily Caller: The Washington Post piece is a national security threat!

I can see it already. The GOP will try to hang the blame for this dysfunction onto the Obama Administration, even though the dysfunction was a creation of the Bush Administration. And when the Dems point out that this was Bush’s doing, the GOP will screech oh, yes, everything is always Bush’s fault.

Not everything, but yeah, most of it. Bush so screwed the national pooch it may never be unscrewed, and what unscrewing is possible will take many years. I’m not letting Obama off the hook entirely, however, because he has appeared to be way too comfortable with the surveillance infrastructure the Bushies bequeathed to him.

Final comment: For all their swaggering about how they were efficient people of business and not bureaucrats, the upper levels of the Bush Administration was staffed almost entirely by people whose careers were made in academia, government, or by family connections. The fact that they fancied themselves to be other than an assortment of hothouse flowers is a testament to their persistent self-delusion. And then there was Karl Rove, whose entire career was as a political operative, and yet who was put in charge or projects like the cleanup after Katrina that required entirely different skill and experience sets.

These people were idea people, albeit with really bad ideas, not people who knew how to do concrete things. They all seemed to have the attitude that once they put their ideas into motion, the details would fall into place. Like charging into Iraq with absolutely no idea what they would do after the invasion. Yes, the unscrewing will take years.

Writing for the right-wing American Spectator, Angelo M. Codevilla reveals that, somehow, America has come to be ruled by an elite. This elite strongly resembles the old and mostly nonexistent liberal elite that has long been the Right’s favorite boogyman (Codevilla makes not-very-veiled allusions to the public school system, identity politics and political correctness). However, this elite includes Republicans as well as Democrats.

The article is fascinating sort of in the way three-day-old road kill is fascinating. But yes, Angelo, there is an elite that is making the decisions for us, and making decisions I don’t like either. They don’t give a bleep about your best interest, or mine. But government is just a tool. Both parties are just tools. The “tea party” movement is just a tool. You are a tool, Codevilla. Wake up.

Codevilla writes,

What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government.

No, that is not what “distinguishes” them. Their power does not depend on government, although they’ve managed to turn government into a nice prop. And government works for them more than for us, which is why government is increasingly unresponsive to the real needs of Americans.

And I assure you, Codevilla, the real heads of the elite never worked a day in their lives for either the government or any non-profit do-gooder organization.

And, Codevilla, if you want to know how you became a tool, read Kevin Drum’s “GOP Fairy Tales.” The real elite get their way by selling lies to ordinary folks, who then will turn out and support whatever the elite wants. So just as the elite managed to convince many farmers they had been wiped out by the “estate tax” even though they couldn’t possibly have owed an estate tax — my suspicion is that they’d done badly in probate court and didn’t understand the difference — now they’re going to dig up small businessmen who will cry they will be ruined if the Bush tax cuts are not renewed, even though those small businessmen will not be impacted at all if the Bush tax cuts are not renewed.

Same old, same old.

I like Russ Feingold, but I think Mark Kleiman makes a good point about Feingold and the financial reform bill. Feingold was the only Democrat who voted with the Republicans against cloture. He did this because he didn’t think the bill was good enough, and I suspect I would agree with all of his objections.

However, Mark says, because Harry Reid had to compromise with some “moderates” so the bill could be voted on, it was watered down even more. Mark writes,

With the W.Va. seat still vacant, that meant that Reid needed Snow, Collins, and Scott Brown, as well as Ben Nelson. … The bill as passed exempts at least three major sources of consumer maltreatment in the financial market: car loans, payday loans, and check-cashing services. It omits the $19B bank tax to pay for bailouts. It has a very weak form of the “Volcker rule,” thus leaving the country exposed to future meltdowns. Those concessions were the price of those last four votes.

Mark goes on to say that Feingold suffers from “integrity narcissism,” which is a great phrase. It’s a syndrome I normally associate with Dennis Kucinich, but if the shoe fits …

Robert Reich says the bill is a mountain of paperwork but a molehill of reform. The bill can’t be a complete waste of paper, however, as the crew at Cafe Hayek is screaming bloody murder about it. And the usual suspects at Reason’s Hit Run, The Corner and Cato complain that the bill misses the root cause of the financial meltdown, which is poor people; or, in the words of Cato’s Mark Calabria, the “never-ending efforts to expand homeownership.” Yes, damn those who allowed themselves to be snookered by the sharks who were making easy money re-selling bad loans.

Kevin Drum gives us the good news and the bad news:

Here’s the good news: this record of progressive accomplishment officially makes Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. And here’s the bad news: this shoddy collection of centrist, watered down, corporatist sellout legislation was all it took to make Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. Take your pick.

Yeah, pretty much. Obama detractors on the Left don’t seem to notice that his initiatives, flawed as they are, are more progressive than anything seriously attempted by either the Carter or Clinton administrations. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t vent frustration and holler about centrist, watered down, corporatist sellout legislation, of course.

However, it does mean that we progressives are in a precarious position, because the popular support for what we’d like to do is soft. I think it’s soft because people don’t understand it, but it’s still soft. And it’s been so long since any genuinely progressive new legislation has been enacted, no one below the age of 50 has memory of it. Which is why integrity narcissism is an indulgence none of us can afford right now.

Sorta kinda related — today’s Paul Krugman column.

The Senate passed a Wall Street reform bill and BP claims it stopped the oil leak.